Cherng Mei's Nick Shih recently took time out to speak to Webpackaging about much more than mascara, eyeliner and lip gloss. Highlighting the changes that the Taiwanese company has made over the last few years, Nick explains how the company's production upgrades have been benefitting customers and enabled the company to increase its services from design and production, to include contract manufacturing, filling and packing.

What is the business focus of Cherng Mei?

Cherng Mei is a colour cosmetics packaging producer. We especially focus on creating packaging for mascara, eyeliner and lip gloss and have recently added make-up compacts and lipstick packaging options into our catalog of products. We both design and produce the products that we provide.

In addition to producing packaging, we also provide contract manufacturing, filling and packing services to cosmetic companies. This complete solution is something which is being increasingly demanded by cosmetic companies.

Where is the company based?

The company is located in Tainan City, in Taiwan and all of our team are based here.

My particular role as General Manager at Cherng Mei means that I am required to travel on occasion as I am involved with the organization of the company's business plan and management, but I do spend most of my time here in Tainan City.

Being in Taiwan, is Asia your primary market?

Our products are targeted to three geographical areas: Europe, North America, and Japan and South-East Asia. Our experience has enabled us to develop a very successful business network here and overseas.

In terms of customers, we work with many international brands, and trading companies.

There are many cosmetic packaging companies, particularly in Asia. How do you ensure that you stand out?

Ultimately I think it is the materials that we choose to work with. We focus on injection components of PETG and AS as they are the most common plastic materials used for cosmetic packaging, and particularly for mascara, eyeliner and lip gloss which are the primary focus of the company. In recent years we've made increasingly more components available in PETG than ever before.

As a company, we spend a lot of time on developing new components and this is also of importance to cosmetic companies. We launch one product every quarter and each and every new design is always tested appropriately to ensure that it is safe prior to introducing it to market.

Cosmetic packaging has seen many changes over the last decade. How has Cherng Mei kept pace?

The last ten years has seen a lot of changes at the company. The most important one is that we have upgraded our facility with the expansion of the entire facility, including the addition of a lot of new machinery. We've also changed from a traditional manual production process to a semi-automated one in order to benefit from stable high quality production and increased capacity too.

Can you tell us about any of your new products?

We've been really busy in production and new product development recently. We're currently in the design process of a few new products and further information about the products will be available soon. We spend a lot of time studying the latest fashions and evaluating the current trends in order to ensure that new product development is really focused on the market's desires.

When will your new products be available?

We'll have many of our new products on display at Cosmoprof Asia in November so visitors to the event can see our latest cosmetic packaging creations for themselves.